MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012)

MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012) Director: Wes Anderson

Anyone who’s seen one of Wes Anderson’s films is prepared for the stylistic and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of this director. Just as you can tell a Robert Altman or David Lynch film without too much effort, Anderson offers his films a visual signature that’s fairly unmistakable. If you haven’t seen a Wes Anderson film, I’d be forced to describe Moonrise Kingdom as Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts as adapted by Stanley Kubrick. And if I have to describe Stanley Kubrick to you, well… you’re on your own.

I think that Anderson shares qualities with all three of those great American film mavericks, but particularly shares traits with Kubrick; the meticulously arranged shots, the ironic and godlike detachment, and the intricate attention to detail join hands and create a film experience that ups the stakes on all of Anderson’s pet notions. More than any of his previous work, this feels like the film that he has been working up to and, because of that, it may prove to be his first true masterpiece.

Unlike his previous films, which are set in the present, but filled with objects and fashions from the recent past, Moonrise Kingdom takes place in the year 1965, a time shortly before the director was born. In a time where a scout master could still smoke in front of children and children still had library cards, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) meet one another at a church performance and strike up a swift and intense junior league romance. Both feeling ostracized from society, Sam as an orphan overseen by Social Services (personified by Tilda Swinton, enacting Mary Poppins’ evil twin) and Suzy as the “troubled child” of disengaged lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), they plot to run away. Everyone seems to be running away from something, whether it’s Scout Master Ward (Ed Norton) who claims he’s a “Khaki Scout” first and a math teacher in his spare time, or Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis, in fine form) who is the policeman of the storybook-like New Penzance Island and is engaged in a sort-of affair with Suzy’s mother. Like the comic strip I mentioned above, Sam and Suzy enjoy an adult-like perspective straight out of the misadventures of Charlie Brown (tellingly, the scout troop’s dog is named Snoopy). Unlike Peanuts, the adults in the film are present and seem to be just as bewildered by the world in which they’ve found themselves. Like many of Anderson’s films, nobody really has a sense of humor about themselves and everyone is busy in the work of losing their innocence or pining for it.

Moonrise Kingdom is a funny, sweet, quirky film, Anderson’s best and most coherent vision since The Royal Tenenbaums, and a film that I am already looking forward to watching again.